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Philip Torrone posted a link to my Mancala game on Make Magazine’s blog. Thanks, Phil!

For this year’s Winter Solstice project, I made a “SleepLight” for Clara. She’s not very good at reading time on conventional clocks, but it seemed useful for her to be able to tell when it’s bedtime and getting-up time, and how long there is till the next significant time. Hence this diurnal clock slash night light.

Since I made my first mod to the PICkit 2 applet source, Microchip completely rewrote the applet. They use .NET, which I consider to be pretty much a virus, but I was considering getting all the MS development tools installed and getting up to speed with C# to work with it.

But then I realized that it would be simple to just automate the existing applet with an external program, and that would mean I wouldn’t have any changes to integrate into the Microchip source (as well as not having the dreaded MS tools installed).

I’ve been working for a while on a simple handheld game machine. It made its official debut at The Farm this summer, so I thought I’d post it here and on the gallery.

My buddy Bob Stuart makes Noise in Montreal. I thought he should have a theremin. Took a weekend. Works.

Clara has always enjoyed playing with electronic components and breadboards. But putting them together to make an actual circuit is still a bit tough for her at 3, even with lots of coaching - getting the leads into exactly the right hole takes a bit more fine motor coordination than she’s got. So, I was inspired by an article in MAKE magazine* to make her some chunky blocks with screw-eye terminals that she can wire together using alligator clip leads. We’ll see how it goes!

The finished unit, running on The Ithaca Commons. More photos are in the gallery.

For the Summer Solstice this year, I refined last year’s PrayBot project by making it more efficient and robust, and again had it running in our city center at noon. The weather cooperated, and so did the gadget, and the people were great. Success!

My PrayBot project last year needed a “solar engine,” and the quickest thing I could come up with was based on a PIC instead of the more usual BEAM-style solutions. This year I wanted something more efficient. But it still ended up with a PIC, and it’s much more efficient than any of the BEAM designs I’ve tried.

Another embarrassing discovery is that the thing in question isn’t working because you didn’t turn it on. This rule could come first, as in some sense it’s more basic than Rule #1, but for the simple AC-powered appliance, you have to plug it in before you can turn it on, so I list it second.

Again, there are lots more useful ways to think about whether you’ve turned something on. For instance: